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On Manosaba, the Promising Star of the VN World

On Manosaba, the Promising Star of the VN World

Stephanie Liu
September 04, 2026

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Welcome to “Siliconera Speaks Up,” our newsletter for the site! We’ve restarted our Siliconera+ ad-free subscription option, and for $1.99 per month, you will see no ads and be automatically entered into our monthly survey. This is your chance to tell us what you’d like to see us work on next month! We have a two-month trial period, so you can test it out and see if it’s for you! If you don’t want to subscribe, you can still enter the September 2026 contest for the chance to win one Heave Ho 2 code for the PC!

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Studio Elan and Crystal Game Works are presenting a Fall in Love visual novel festival on Steam. Until September 9, 2026, you can get deals on romantic visual novels, as well as browse demos for upcoming games. It was actually while I was looking through the games here that I discovered Death & Faeology. I’m already loving the look of the art and UI, and I’m super interested in the setting and story!

While Death & Faeology looks like a game that only features straight romance—and I say “looks like” because it’s not out yet, and I like to jump into games completely blind so I haven’t touched the demo—the Fall in Love visual novel festival also features LGBTQ+ romance games if they’re more your thing. Iwakura Aria, for example, is featured here, and that was definitely a yuri.

Speaking of yuri and visual novels, today’s newsletter will focus on Magical Girl Witch Trials, or Manosaba. If you’ve been tuned into discussions of Japanese visual novels, you might have seen people mention it once or twice. Acacia announced that sales for the game have surpassed 700,000 units—an impressive feat for a game that’s only available in Japanese or Simplified Chinese, as of the time of writing—ahead of the global release.

As a note, I am just a fan of the game and have nothing to do with Acacia or any of the other companies involved with the game. I genuinely just want to get the word out to anyone who might not know about it or was interested in it, because this is probably the best visual novel I’ve played all year.

Magical Girl Witch Trials is a visual novel that, to put it simply, is like a combination between Danganronpa and Madoka Magica. It features girls with magical powers who find themselves locked in a prison manor. As their powers develop and they transform into a witch, they’ll be struck by the overwhelming desire to murder those around them, and when one inevitably does, a witch trial will begin in which the other girls have to find out who the murderer is.

To go into specific details of what I like about it would count as a spoiler. But I really like the quality of the story and character writing, as well as how it avoids the natural pitfalls and weaknesses of the death game genre. I ended the game liking literally every single girl. It’s also fully voiced, which is amazing when you see the number of routes that are possible within the trials, as they’ve prepared lines and interactions between the characters for each answer, including the wrong ones. As the game doesn’t penalize you for being wrong, you can test out all the options to see they say or how they react without having to worry about game over-ing.

This lack of a fail state opens up the possibility to just spam all the evidence and dialogue options if you’re really stuck, so some people might find it way too easy as a puzzle game, but I argue that Magical Girl Witch Trials really wasn’t aiming to be a puzzle-focused visual novel like Danganronpa or Ace Attorney. So constantly comparing it against those games while playing it takes away from the intended experience.

Currently, there is no release window yet for the official English version of the game. I heard that there is a fanmade translation patch for those who don’t want to wait. Acacia and Re,AER have two other games that are coming out this year: Magical Girl Taboo Village and The Streamer’s Alt Account Labyrinth, with the latter to have a playable demo to check out at TGS 2026. Considering there are only four months left in 2026, I’m really unsure if they can pull it off, especially since there’s also Magical Girl Witch Trials’s English version coming out this year, but I sure hope they can.

For fans of visual novels, cute girls, yuri, and sad yet touching stories, Acacia and Re,AER are definitely studios to keep an eye on.

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On Manosaba, the Promising Star of the VN World

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